Yeah you certainly are, when you phone checks email etc on it's own, it checks it in the....... wait for it....... background, the way it's set essentialy means that it wont connect to the internet without you making it do so by manually checking email, or refreshing feeds etc.

Look at the second image at the allow background connections, turn it on for the top one (mobile data / wlan), probably just ignore the roaming one, you'd need a damn good phone plan to be worth using the net overseas.
Also you might want to have a look at this page that you might have missed, settings -> notifications -> feed on home screen.

So many settings, so little time.

All should be back to normal with just the background connections being activated.